<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
But the third war was to last just a day. The Karabakh presidency said its army had been outnumbered \u201cseveral times over\u201d by Azerbaijani forces and had no choice but to surrender and agree to \u201cthe dissolution and complete disarmament of its armed forces,\u201d by which time Azerbaijan had killed at least 200 people and injured many hundreds more. A second ceasefire \u2013 also brokered by Russia \u2013 came into effect at 1 p.m. on September 20. <\/p>\n
The swiftness of Karabakh\u2019s surrender was a measure of its military inferiority. Armed with Turkish drones, Azerbaijan won a crushing victory in 2020, attacking not only Nagorno-Karabakh but also Armenia itself. Unlike in 2020, Armenia\u2019s armed forces did not attempt to defend the region during the most recent offensive \u2013 in part out of fear of further Azerbaijani aggression. <\/p>\n
Karabakh\u2019s despair was Baku\u2019s triumph. In a speech to the nation Wednesday evening, Azerbaijan\u2019s President Ilham Aliyev announced his forces had \u201cpunished the enemy properly\u201d and that Baku had restored its sovereignty \u201cwith an iron fist.\u201d <\/p>\n
Shahramanyan, the regions\u2019 president, said Thursday he had signed the decree \u201cdue to the current difficult military-political situation.\u201d The Azerbaijani presidency had previously insisted that the Artsakh government \u2013 as well as its armed forces \u2013 also dissolve itself. It warned if they did not do so, that the offensive would continue \u201cuntil the end.\u201d <\/p>\n
The day after the ceasefire, Baku sent representatives to meet with Karabakh officials and discuss \u201creintegration.\u201d Few details were released of the talks, but Azerbaijan has long been explicit about the choice confronting ethnic Armenians in the region. <\/p>\n
In a speech delivered in May, he said Karabakh officials needed to \u201cbend their necks\u201d and accept full integration into Azerbaijan. <\/p>\n
Aliyev claimed that the rights of Karabakh Armenians \u201cwill be guaranteed,\u201d but Armenia\u2019s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and international experts have repeatedly warned of the risk of ethnic cleansing. <\/p>\n
Anna Ohanyan, a senior scholar in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said she feared what would happen to local residents who chose to stay and attempted to refuse Azerbaijani citizenship. <\/p>\n
More than half of the local population had fled Nagorno-Karabakh for Armenia by Thursday morning. Many harbored no hope that they can ever return to their ancestral homeland. <\/p>\n
Ohanyan said that the best case scenario would be that Azerbaijan erects \u201ca Potemkin village\u201d \u2013 that is, a sham settlement intending to paint a false picture to the outside world, the sort once used to impress Russian empress Catherine the Great. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut in the long term, I think there will be a systematic push, continued demographic engineering to push Armenian communities outside the region,\u201d Ohanyan said. <\/p>\n
Poghosyan arrived in Armenia Thursday morning with her husband, twin children, parents and grandmother. She said what ordinarily would have been a 45 minute drive had taken the seven of them 35 hours, so snarled up was the road. <\/p>\n
Pashinyan said in a speech Sunday his government \u201cwill welcome our sisters and brothers of Nagorno-Karabakh to the Republic of Armenia with all care.\u201d <\/p>\n
But how prepared Armenia \u2013 a nation of some 2.8 million people \u2013 is to house up to 120,000 arrivals from Nagorno-Karabakh remains unclear. <\/p>\n
Many of those on the move landed in temporary refugee camps set up in the border towns of Goris and Kornidzor. During a visit to Armenia, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) chief Samantha Power warned those arriving were suffering from \u201csevere malnutrition.\u201d <\/p>\n
Nagorno-Karabakh has been under blockade since December 2022, when Azerbaijan-backed activists established a military checkpoint on the Lachin corridor. <\/p>\n
Vartanyan, of Crisis Group, said she was concerned about who would manage the routes into Armenia. \u201cWill it be Russian peacekeepers, the ICRC, or will it be Azerbaijani authorities?\u201d she asked. \u201cDoes it mean people will have to go through filtration camps? And then will people get detained \u2013 for example, the local men who took part in the fighting in the past, or those who were part of the local de facto authorities?\u201d <\/p>\n
Over the weekend, \u201cone of the main things that people were doing in Stepanakert was burning all the possible documentation that could become evidence for the Azerbaijani authorities that they personally were part of the de facto government,\u201d Vartanyan said. <\/p>\n
On Wednesday, Ruben Vardanyan, a prominent Karabakh politician and businessman, was arrested at a border checkpoint at the Lachin corridor and taken to Baku, the border service said. Vardanyan was indicted for multiple charges Thursday, including financing terrorism, participating in the creation and activities of illegal armed groups, and illegally crossing Azerbaijani borders, according to state media. <\/p>\n
The Azerbaijani State Security Services allege that Vardanyan funded \u201cillegal military units\u201d in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Baku has long maintained that the Artsakh government and its armed forces have operated illegally on Azerbaijan\u2019s territory. A video published by the security services appeared to show Vardanyan in detention. <\/p>\n
David Babayan, a local politician and adviser to president Shahramanyan, said Thursday he would hand himself in to Azerbaijan. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou all know that I am included in the black list of Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijani side demanded my arrival in Baku for an appropriate investigation,\u201d Babayan wrote on Telegram. \u201cMy failure to appear, or worse, my escape, will cause serious harm to our long-suffering nation.\u201d <\/p>\n
In the decree signed Thursday, president Shahramanyan called on Azerbaijan to allow the \u201cfree, unconstrained, and unhindered passing of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh, including the militants who laid down their weapons, with their property and transportation means through Lachin corridor.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The self-declared republic of Nagorno-Karabakh will cease to exist from next year after its president signed a decree dissolving state institutions following its defeat by Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani victory last week triggered a huge exodus of ethnic Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh and marked the end of decades of conflict \u2013 and potentially the end of <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9338,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9337","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}